A Dairy Farm in Trenton, Florida, is Turning Cow Manure into Profits
Jan Henderson is the CEO of Alliance Dairies in Trenton, the largest free-stall dairy in Florida, with more than 6,500 Holstein cows. One of her responsibilities in managing a farm this large is processing the cow’s manure. Alliance uses a system called an anaerobic digester to process their manure. Once the manure goes into the digester, it sits in the oxygen-free environment while bacteria break it down for almost a month. The resulting methane is pumped into a generator, which uses the gas to create electricity.
Moving forward, Alliance has partnered with TECO Peoples Gas, a natural gas distribution utility that serves almost 425,000 customers in Florida, to build a biogas conditioning facility. This will clean the methane and turn it into natural gas, which will then be pumped onto an interstate pipeline. That gas can theoretically be used for energy all over the country. This can actually make the farm more money.